## Prerequisites

### Eclipse

Before installing the EPIC plug-in, a recent version of Eclipse has to be installed. The minimum requirement is version 3.1 of Eclipse for EPIC 'stable' and version 3.2 of Eclipse for EPIC 'testing'.

Eclipse comes in two flavors. The SDK version contains Java IDE components and is much larger than the Platform version. If you only want to use Eclipse as a Perl IDE, the Platform version is sufficient. If you are in for Perl and Java coding, use the SDK version.

Eclipse does not include a Java Runtime Environment (JRE). You will need a 1.4.1 level or higher Java Runtime or Java Development Kit (JDK) installed on your machine in order to run Eclipse.

Eclipse can be downloaded from www.eclipse.org.

### Perl

In order to have all EPIC features like Syntax Checking, Source Formatting etc., a Perl interpreter is needed. In principle any Perl interpreter can be used. To use debugging within Eclipse, Perl version 5.8.x or 5.6.x is required. For further requirements concerning the debugger, see the section called “Setting Up the Debugger”.

Most *nix/Linux installations will provide Perl interpreters out of the box.

Perl for Windows can be downloaded from www.activestate.com

### Considerations when using Cygwin

Make sure that the mount command is available and that it is in your system path. As mount is a standard component of Cygwin, you usually just have to add the cygwin\bin directory to your system path.